State of the Union 2018

So, companies are giving out bonuses, little kids are putting flags on veteran's graves, Trump is nominating judges, several Congressmen and women in the audience can't keep their hands off their cell phones, Trump manages to take a swipe at the NFL's "We don't stand for the national anthem" BS. We're exporting energy and importing cash to invest in America. Apparently there's a presidential initiative to start drag races in Detroit; that's a better use for the real estate than a bunch of abandoned buildings.

So far, it sounds like winning, winning, more winning, so much winning you'll get tired of winning, but I'm not tired of winning yet so keep it coming.

Trade deals will be "fair and reciprocal". Trump will protect our intellectual property through enforcement of trade rules. (Aimed at china).

Here comes his request for a huge infrastructure bill. $1.5 trillion.

I'm not a fan of the spending, but if anyone can get it done without the bullshit and waste... that's actually Trump's area of expertise. Well, aside from the golden toilets. I want to see specifics about the bill. But since Trump isn't the one who writes it, he can't really give them to us.

MS-13 gang members murders. "Illegal alien unaccompanied minors" -- not said, but those are also the DACA crowd. Americans are dreamers too.

Melania looks bored, but I can't blame her. I doubt politics was on her list of life goals after "trophy wife".

"Protects the nuclear family by ending chain migration"... interesting formulation. I agree with the policy but that formation seems like a stretch.

Foreign aid to only go to friends, not enemies... keeping score of UN votes about the embassy move. Sanity!

McCabe at center of FBI controversy over leaking of manipulated stories

So, if you've been paying attention at all to politics, you've learned about normal crimes versus process crimes. Normal crimes are when you do something wrong, like set up a personal email server to avoid FOIA requests, and route classified national security information to your address there. Process crimes are when you lie to the FBI -- even accidentally, like when they ambush you in your office claiming to want to talk to you about something else -- about something you did that was perfectly legal, and then they charge you with lying to the FBI about it even though there isn't any underlying crime.

Partisan operatives in or close to the FBI communicated snippets of information with reporters who didnt demand proof or substantiation, then FBI officials denied to White House officials who knew the facts that they were seeding that information, then officials suggested that White House operatives were obstructing justice by asking for the truth to out. At a time when people are looking for patterns, this is a pattern of improper behavior that deserves focus from the media.

This is the same idea, except worse. According to the account in the book, which is according to the account in this article, McCabe called up Rince Priebus and told him about a "bullshit" media story about Trump contacts with Russia. Priebus asked him if he could tell the press that the story was bullshit. McCabe said he would have to check, and later said he could not. And like clockwork, the "bullshit" story went away and the story about Priebus trying to get McCabe to shut down a media story on the Russia investigation started. The obvious implication is that McCabe called Priebus to get the predictable reaction ("Can't you tell them it's all bullshit?") and mischaracterized that as the White House applying pressure to the FBI to make the media shut up. Worse, the original story appears to bear fingerprints to suggest it may have been planted by McCabe originally. FBI Director (at the time) Comey may have also been involved.

Leak detection 101

Secondly, it is not coincidental that now the Justice Department has had an opportunity to preview the Nunes memo content, we begin seeing leaks about it in the New York Times.

The Black Hat operatives within the DOJ and FBI are desperate to get out ahead of the stories.

Think about it. The Nunes memo was available to congress for over a week, and not a single -substantive- material leak came out. Yet, within HOURS of the Justice Department having access to the memo, the New York Times is writing about specific details contained within the memo.

I think the FBI leadership have forgotten their training on the concept of Canary Traps.

This is about as close to firing someone as it gets in government service without paying lawyers. If he wasn't fired, he's stepping out before the House votes to release the memo in hopes of avoiding fallout from it. That vote is scheduled for 5pm today.

I'll also add the likely real driving force behind this proposal: Such a network would represent a single point of surveillance. It's much easier for the government to evesdrop on everyone in the country when they own the cell phone network outright. None of those pesky warrants or third-party companies that might fight them in court.

The Amnesty Kerfluffle

The Trump White House announced that it would announce an immigration plan on Monday, something it thinks both sides of Congress and the issue can agree to compromise on.

We haven't seen that plan yet. We've seen what people have leaked that claims to be that plan.

In politics, those are called "trial balloons". You release leaks ahead of time, see what the reaction is, and adjust the final release to take those reactions into account. Maybe you change it, maybe you don't, but at least you know ahead of time how people will react to it.

So far, Trump's base seems to be reacting negatively. Trump may get the signal that the leaked proposal is too much amnesty and backpeddle. Or maybe the leaks didn't come from him and his actual plan doesn't resemble what leaked to begin with.

The only strong objection I have to the plan as leaked is the end of E-Verify. I don't like handing out amnesty and a path to citizenship, but for a small number of people, who can be subjected to background checks and be disqualified if they fail to remain law-abiding citizens (aside from the initial, illegal entry), it might be a workable compromise. But, because of the trust deficit on this issue, it has to be significantly delayed -- and canceled if the other elements of the deal are messed with.

My take on the issue is simple.

First, I won't waste a lot of time worrying about any proposal I see before Monday. The real proposal is Monday. Anything before Monday is a trial balloon. That doesn't mean don't react to the trial balloon. It's the reaction that makes it useful. But don't treat it as an unforgivable betrayal when it isn't even a real proposal yet.

Second, as things stand, Trump needs any bill dealing with the issue to get to 60 votes. That means significant compromise is inevitable if anything is going to pass at all. Some group of people are going to get amnestied. If Trump can keep that number down while getting significant concessions (wall actually built, enforcement actually funded, policy changes that fix some of the problems) that's not necessarily a bad deal.

Third, Trump is trying to take the middle ground here. That's generally the President's goal: let the extremes in Congress say their piece and then propose something that 51% of the population can agree with broadly. He's specifically looking for something that can break off enough Dem Senators to get to 60 votes. Every time he shakes up the game by throwing a proposal out there, he gets to see if anyone twitches like they want to go for it. He's probably not going to get Schumer or other hardliners on board. But he doesn't need to. He just needs 8-10 of them.

Are we all unconscious racists?

Now we are learning that the Implicit Association Test is all bunk. Althea Nagai at the Center for Equal Opportunity drilled deep into the methods and reliability of the test and published this report at the Heritage Foundation. It's time for every source of federal dollars - particularly at the Office of Justice Programs and the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department - to read the report and cut off all sources of grant funding for any programs that rely on the bunk of the Implicit Association Test. Here's why.

The problem with the idea that everyone is somehow an unconscious racist based on millesecond differences in reaction time to words is that it removes the element of choice. People choose their actions, because they control those actions. They may or may not control exactly they they think, but they absolutely control what they say and what they do. If racism is to be measured not by choices and expressed opinions but unexpressed -- even suppressed -- thoughts, then not only is everyone condemned to be a racist by this amoral measurement, they are also condemned permanently and unforgivably to that fate. It is impossible for them to NOT be a racist.

At that point, why even try to do the right thing?

I firmly believe that all people have the right to be evaluated as individuals based on all reasonably available information. But when decisions are being made and tracked at the millisecond scale, you're barely engaging conscious decision making at all. You're tracking unconscious decision-making, basically instinct, and probably not very accurately.. and then assigning that measurement a dangerous amount of moral weight. That's immoral in itself, and arguably abusive of the subjects, who doubtless did not expect to be labeled unconscious racists when they agreed to participate in the study.

DOJ withholds vast majority of FBI texts from Congress

The Justice Department has given Congress less than 15 percent of the texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page  and that is all Congress is likely to get, at least until department experts finish an effort to recover an unknown number of previously lost texts that were sent and received during a key five-month period during the Trump-Russia investigation.

How many texts will be turned over? First, it's not possible to know how many texts from the Dec. 14, 2016 to May 17, 2017 time period will be recovered and turned over. But of the 50,000 the Justice Department already has in hand, officials say they have already turned over all they're going to give to Congress.

That means Justice has decided to allow Congress to see just 7,000 of a total of 50,000 Strzok-Page texts  slightly less than 15 percent of the total number of texts the Justice Department has now.

Read the whole thing. It's an outrage. Congress is not indulging in idle curiousity here. They are investigating a serious matter with criminal implications that places in doubt the ability of the DOJ and the FBI to participate in investigations of their own misbehavior. The only appropriate response of the FBI and DOJ here is to turn over everything, without filtering, and let congressional staff handle the matter.

Not mentioned in this article is the interesting analysis that suggests the claim Strzok and Page were having an affair came from Strzok and/or Page themselves. They were talking to the reporter who originally made that claim publicly. Why would they make that claim if it wasn't true? Well, it would provide a reason for their secretive behavior and sneaking around, if they suddenly needed one because their leaking to reporters and water-carrying for Hillary started to get into the newspapers.

heh

We clearly need to amend the constitution to create a fourth, co-equal branch of government. We could called it: The Office of Presidential Harassment. The Special Harasser would be appointed by opposition party to the president. This would get it out from under the DoJ.

It would have sweeping powers of non-probable cause, willy-nilly subpoena powers, granting immunity, and deleting/erasing/losing exculpatory evidence. It's investigative powers would not be limited to the President. It would encompass the president's family, donors, business associates, friends, acquaintances, hangers-on, and groupies since birth.

It would also have the power to wiretap, surveille, or spy on the president based upon real or imagined evidence.

If indicted, a hearing would held in front of all living presidents of the opposition party. If convicted, the defeated candidate in the previous election would assume the Presidency.

I don't think we need to amend the constitution to create this fourth branch. I think we already have it.

White House was hacked through a fishing email, and gained access to most of Obama's email. (Oops!) Funny how hackers getting access to the White House and even the president's email was not bigger news at the time, isn't it?

The State Department was hacked (under Kerry), which is what provided access to the White House... sort of. There's no need for access to state.gov to send a fishing email to whitehouse.gov, but I'll give the article the benefit of the doubt and assume it helped.

Both of those things were reported at the time and while major embarrassments for the White House, had nothing to do with the election.

There is nothing here related to the hacking of the DNC (which was probably an internal leak anyway).

There is nothing here related to Hillary's tenure at State.

There is nothing here related to Hillary's personal email server, which may or may not have been hacked; the hackers in that case did not release email dumps and the incident had nothing to do with the results of the 2016 election in any technical way; Hillary's poor judgment in setting up the server did.

There is nothing here related to the US 2016 election cycle and the election of President Trump, despite the article being deceptively written to imply that it did.

A senior adviser to Hillary Clintons 2008 presidential campaign who was accused of repeatedly sexually harassing a young subordinate was kept on the campaign at Mrs. Clintons request, according to four people familiar with what took place.

Mrs. Clintons campaign manager at the time recommended that she fire the adviser, Burns Strider. But Mrs. Clinton did not. Instead, Mr. Strider was docked several weeks of pay and ordered to undergo counseling, and the young woman was moved to a new job.

About those illegal aliens in the DACA program...

More than 500 individuals who obtained DACA benefits that were later revoked due to criminal and/or gang involvement apparently are still living in the country and at large, according to statistics provided by USCIS to Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. These cases are 25 percent of those who lost DACA status due to criminal and/or gang activity as of November 2017. Only about 30 percent of the ex-DACA criminal aliens have been removed or were in ICE custody as of November 2017.

According to USCIS, a total of 2,127 individuals had their DACA status terminated for criminal activity and/or gang activity as of November 22, 2017. In no more than 3 percent of these cases did the termination occur merely because of gang involvement; nearly all of the terminations followed criminal convictions or arrests, according to related data on the USCIS website.

Under current law, gang members are not automatically barred from receiving immigration benefits such as green cards, work permits, and Temporary Protected Status, and clearly many have obtained these benefits in recent years.

DOJ IG recovers missing text messages between Page and Strzok

The Justice Department's inspector general has informed lawmakers that a trove of missing text messages exchanged between FBI employees has been recovered. In a letter to lawmakers on Thursday, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz wrote that this week his office was able to recover texts sent between Strzok and Page over a five-month span from December 2016 to May 2017.

Well, they sure didn't stay missing long, did they? As this incident should remind us, when the government wants to recover text messages, they can generally recover the text messages. When they don't want to recover the text messages, as with the case of the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, it's a cover up.

And speaking of coverups, I feel that I should point out that the IG had to use "forensic tools" to recover those missing text messages. That means someone tried to delete them, probably Page and Strzok themselves, which speaks to consciousness of guilt.

UPDATE: I meant to point out that the notification does not say "all" messages were recovered, which potentially leaves some wiggle room. We don't know how many messages were actually recovered, out of how many total.

Calling for the dissolution of the FBI

Howie Carr starts it. This may seem like a big step, but realistically, the FBI was founded in 1908, so it's been around for less than half of our nation's history. In that time, it's been at the center of many political scandals, including the most recent one and the well-known corruption and blackmail of the years under Hoover. If that wasn't enough, the FBI was also heavily involved in the Waco Massacre and the Ruby Ridge incident, and knew about the Oklahoma City bombing in advance.

We now know that at least the headquarters branch of the entire agency has been irredeemably politicized and corrupted.

Howie Carr may be right. It may be time to take drastic action to disband the FBI headquarters office and reconstitute a similar agency under a new name, new leadership, and new headquarters staff.

Parallels

What emerges from all this evidence of astonishing bias is a probe that didnt seek to discover a crime but create one. The goal was to scare Trump officials into committing minor process crimes and Michael Flynn tripped up under that pressure. Now the hope of the investigators is that they can set a perjury trap for Trump. On Tuesday, as the media ignored the Strzok story, it made great noise about Comey sharing memos with Mueller about his meetings with Trump. The same journalists who pooh-poohed the FBIs anti-Trump plotting perked up at news of Mueller interviewing his close friend.

This is not the slow unfolding of justice but scenes from a show trial, one in which the only serious crimes are committed by abusive prosecutors and investigators, so intoxicated by their own political self-righteousness that they can brag to their paramours about the fix on Trump.

It's ironic how many parallels there are between the plot against Trump and the "vast right wing conspiracy" that Hillary famously thought was behind her husband's impeachment. Believing in a vast right wing conspiracy is surely emotionally easier than facing your husband's serial infidelity, but it doesn't justify creating a vast left wing conspiracy to hound an innocent not-guilty-of-this-particular-crime man.

Why did Obama's FBI give Hillary a pass on her email server?

From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clintonemails caper was President Barack Obamas call  not the FBIs, and not the Justice Departments. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) The decision was inevitable. Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.

Kerry talks up a coup in the Palestinian Authority

Ma'ariv reported that former US Secretary of State John Kerry met in London with a close associate of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Hussein Agha, for a long and open conversation about a variety of topics.

During the conversation, according to the report, Kerry asked Agha to convey a message to Abbas and ask him to "hold on and be strong." Tell him, he told Agha, "that he should stay strong in his spirit and play for time, that he will not break and will not yield to President Trump's demands." According to Kerry, Trump will not remain in office for a long time. It was reported that within a year there was a good chance that Trump would not be in the White House.

So not only is Kerry negotiating with terrorists, and doing so in direct opposition to the interests of the American people as expressed in their choice of President, he is also doing it as a private citizen with no official government position.

And he's talking openly about conducting a coup.

Because that's what it would take to get Trump out of office before 2020. Even if the Dems take the House in 2018 and immediately file impeachment charges, the chances they get 2/3rds of the Senate to vote in favor of removing Trump from office on the basis of their transparently fake and fraudulent dossier is precisely zilch. Using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump on mental grounds seems even shakier.

How to reconcile these claims? Well, the preliminary report is from October 1st, 2017. Perhaps the investigating agencies are just keeping things quiet while they run down leads and try to apprehend any other suspects... or perhaps they still don't want to admit it was terrorism. Given the number of conspiracies revealed at the FBI and DOJ lately, coupled with the very strange information released about this attack already, I'm leaning towards the latter.

Ursula K Le Guin passes away

I can't fairly claim she was one of my favorite authors. She did write one of my favorite trilogies, however, something that (though much shorter) is a work of art that compares quite well with Tolkein. That would be the EarthSea trilogy (A Wizard of EarthSea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore). Do not continue any farther than that; the brain eater got her before she returned to the series decades later.

Hannity claims DOJ has started to recover missing text messages

Fox News Sean Hannity said Wednesday night on Hannity that the Justice Department has started recovering some of the missing texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, citing DOJ sources. [...] Hannity said sources at the DOJ told him they have begun to recover some of the texts from that time period. Specific content from those texts has not been released.

There are lots of places you can go to recover those messages, if you're serious about getting them. If nothing else, the NSA should have them.